Credit: Alex Mead
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inema,” famed filmmaker JeanLuc Godard is credited with opining, “is the most beautiful fraud in the world.”
3D PRINTING Makes the Unreal Real A “gold-plated” version of the James Bond’s classic 1964 Aston Martin DB5 prop made from 18 3DP parts sold at Christie’s.
20 • Canadian Cinematographer - October 2015
Indeed, cinematography sometimes seems to be about making the unreal seem real and the real seem unreal, blurring the lines between truth and deception in telling a story. Lighting, lenses and framing dance with scripts, actors, movement and vision but let us not forget the other elements in the scene, the costumes and the locations. Of course, these days everything done in the flesh can be done artificially. Mechanical sharks, CGI-created terminators and green screens have all made the impossible possible, the unreal real. Toronto has a proud legacy of digital
effects, stretching back to Alias Research in 1983, which later became Alias Wavefront before being merged into Autodesk in 2006. Maya, its 3D modelling software, was state of the art when it launched in 1998, winning an Oscar for scientific and technological achievement in 2003. The digital art behind the art of cinematography continues to evolve: 3D printing, also called additive manufacturing, is now another option for producers and cinematographers alike. The former like it because they can reduce production costs in some cases, and the latter are thrilled because real props and real costumes allow greater latitude in the moment rather than having to be locked into what was decided months ago on a storyboard and fed into a computer. Traditionally, models would be made by hand and then go through iterations before final approval for filming. That’s expensive. With large objects it is even more expensive. 3DP objects, be they props, costumes or parts of a set, can be created in miniature, tweaked and then approved for large-scale production.
